"The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power": Transforming the Mines of Moria into Halls of Khazad-dûm

It's hard to imagine now that there are multiple movies and a TV show based on J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, but at one point there were very different and competing visions of what Middle-earth looks like. "The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power" production designer Ramsey Avery fell in love with Tolkien's illustrations in the 70s and saw it evolve over the decades to the point where the work of and was so central to The Peter Jackson's vision for his "Lord of the Rings" films, they were both hired as concept artists for the series.

Avery's particular challenge on "The Rings of Power" was to create both familiar and unfamiliar environments - both unevolved and much more evolved versions of the cultures that feature in Jackson's trilogy. But one place that presented Avery with both the widest canvas for trying new things and the tightest sense of what already exists is the one place we've all seen before: the dwarf city of Khazad-dûm , which will one day become the Mines. of Moria.

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Moria, when seen in "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring", is a ruin of cobwebs and corpses, rocky tracks through carved lintels that look more like the architecture of a dungeon than a city, complete with ominous puddles and jagged, uneven crevices. There are plenty of places for orcs to hide. When the community arrives, full of towering columns that seem to stretch to the mountaintop above, we get a sense of the literal heights reached by the now-destroyed civilization; Howard Shore's score, full of drum rolls and proud horns, only adds to its haunting monumentality. Avery's somewhat contradictory work was both about recapturing vibrant city life and reminiscent of what we see in "Fellowship", creating a Khazad-dûm for a more innocent time.

"With the dwarves, literally the quote [from the books and the film] is that they 'digged too greedily and too deep,' right?" Avery told IndieWire. "That's what brought them down. So what does that represent visually, that sense of gluttony and depth? When you look at the architecture [in 'The Fellowship of the Ring'], it's really monumental.These volumes are huge and the forms are massive and there is figurative work that is enormous.

"But when you go back to what Tolkien said about dwarves, that they're stone and flint, and there's this great talk, I think, in 'The Two Towers' that Gimli gives about shimmering caves, where he talks about how [the dwarves treat stone] with such reverence and care that sometimes they only do one or two shimmers a day to form it. And I thought, eh well, that's really the difference between the second and the third age."